Asian Angle | Forget Felicity Huffman. Bribes aren’t the real scandal in US college admissions. This is
- Why grease the palm of an admissions official when there are perfectly legal ways of cheating your way into America’s top universities?
- Among the most pernicious is this: the time-honoured tradition of ‘legacy’ places
Then I signed up to take the SAT and ordered such prep books as I could find on Amazon. My parents had a spare room next to our garage that smelled of exhaust fumes every time they came back with the car. In there, for the next couple of months, I spent my nights and weekends studying for the SAT – aside from doing my regular school work.
Then my mother took the two-hour drive with me up to Auckland on a Friday evening. We stayed overnight in a cheap hotel. The next morning, I went to take my SAT.
I also filled out the application forms by myself. My parents had suggestions. But because they were Taiwanese immigrants, I could not trust their command of English. So I ignored them. My high school teachers were happy to write letters of recommendation for me, but I doubted that any of them had ever written one to Harvard or Yale or MIT.
That was how I got accepted to Yale.
Consultants? Never heard of them.
